Student Body
by FiveRivers
Summary: A Phic Phight entry! Sam and Tucker weren't the only ones in the basement the day the portal turned on...


**Hello. I wrote this when I should have been working on my other fics. I am terrible. This is for the Phic Phight, and is based on a prompt by reallydumbdannyphantomaus. It is a one shot. I am not planing to continue it. **

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Student Body

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The elder two Fentons, both PhDs, were well known throughout Amity Park as inventors, self-proclaimed ghost hunters, and the local lunatics. Elsewhere in the country, if they were known at all, they were known for their inventions, forays into theoretical physics, and their significant personal wealth.

Perhaps that was why, when Maddie and Jack Fentom invited Danny's science class to visit their lab and see the unveiling of their newest invention, Mr Lancer, Casper High's newest teacher, took the bait.

Right now, he looked like he was regretting that. Danny certainly was.

"D-Dr Fenton," said Mr Lancer, nervously, "you say 'ghosts' but you, you must be using that word for, for some kind of theoretical particle that you hope to detect, right?"

There he was, hoping that Jack and Maddie were just eccentric, rather than completely insane. Danny sunk lower in his seat while his classmates snickered and whispered, their metal folding chairs squeaking on the lab floor. _They _all knew about the Fentons were _freaks._

"No way! We're talking about one-hundred-percent real specters! Spooks!"

"Evil echos of the human consciousness, spawned upon their progenitors' death," explained Maddie, oblivious to her son's embarassment. "They are composed of exotic particles, however, and we've confirmed the existence of those. We call the substance ectoplasm. It powers most of our inventions!" Maddie gestured to the lab at large, indicating the green ooze that dripped from the tables, and the strange, glowing machinery that lined the walls and was liberally scattered around the basement lab.

"Sooo..." said Star, drawing out the sound. Malice underlaid every word. "What was this... thingy... supposed to do?"

"It's the Fenton Ghost Portal!" boomed Jack. "I'm sure that to all you, it seems like a very strange machine!"

"It's designed to view a world unseen-!"

Danny tuned out the long-winded explanation. He had heard it hundreds of times before. A ball of paper smacked him in the back of the head. He turned around and briefly met Dash's eyes. He cringed away from what he saw there. Those eyes promised a beating for making Dash sit through this, for making him wear that awful orange safety jumpsuit. They promised that he would never be even be able to _touch _the social ladder, let alone get above the bottom rung. This would spread and spread and spread until everyone in school heard about it.

Maybe Danny was reading too much into it.

"Don't let them get to you, Danny," said Sam, snapping a picture of the portal with her antique camera. "They're too shallow to appreciate this."

"Yeah, they're just all secretly jealous," said Tucker. He was taking... something... apart. Even Danny didn't know what it was, and he _lived _here. "They _wish _they had this much tech."

Danny snuck a glance at Paulina. Danny didn't think she was shallow, and she didn't look jealous. Actually, she looked bored and disgusted.

Once upon a time, back in elementary school, the so-called freak trio of Casper High (formerly of Friendly Elementary and Manual Bookbinder Middle School) had been a _quartet. _It had consisted of Danny Fenton, of the crazy ghost-hunting Fentons, Sam Manson, the creepy, violent goth, Tucker Foley, the socially inept technophile... and Paulina Sanchez, the weirdo Mexican kid.

Danny had thought she was incredibly cool. She spoke two languages! She had lived in three different countries! She could do cartwheels!

But then, in middle school she had changed. She'd gotten a makeover. She stopped wearing braids. Then, she stopped hanging out with the three of them, and started to hang out with the bullies, and Star and Valerie, who were pretty, rich, and mean. Then came the name calling.

Danny still had a massive crush on her. He secretly hoped that she would start being friends with them again. Fat chance of that happening after this.

The explanation had wound down, finally, leaving his parents standing triumphantly in front of the non-functional portal. Jack had two large extension cable ends in his hand, one male, one female, and a manic grin on his face.

"Brace yourselves, kids!" said Maddie.

"Bonzai!" yelled Jack. He shoved the ends together.

The portal whirred to life, a deep hum building, then fading. The walls of the portal began to glow, just slightly. Then, from the very back, came a spark, a flash of light-!

Then nothing.

Silence, but for the hum.

"Did it... work?" asked Mikey Snow, hesitantly.

Dash scoffed, leaning back in his seat, arms crossed, as if to disguise the fact that he, like everyone else, had just been inclined forward in anticipation. "Of course it didn't! Don't be stupid. Ghosts don't exist."

Kwan laughed. "Yeah, I thought you were s'posed to be smart, Snow."

Mikey blushed and looked away.

Meanwhile, Danny's parents were arguing at whisper level, whole chunks of their conversation lost to the ambient noise and the mocking voices of high school students.

"Jack, did you double check the-?"

"Of course I did, what about the-?"

"Maybe the power wasn't-?"

"If you had just-!"

"I didn't-!"

"-ectosignature-?"

"The equations clearly-"

"Dr Fenton, Dr Fenton," interrupted Mr Lancer. He jerked his head upstairs. "A word, if you do not mind?"

Danny's parents froze, and, very sheepishly, started up the stairs.

"Don't touch anything," hissed Mr Lancer, before following the other two adults up and out of sight. Out of hearing, too, once the sound-proofed door clanged shut.

Dash kicked the back of Danny's seat, hard, spilling him onto the floor. Danny peeled himself up off the floor, the black gloves of his custom jumpsuit sticking slightly.

Sam jumped out of her seat, immediately ready to fight. "Back off, Baxter!"

"Whatcha gonna do, Manson?" the large blonde sneered.

The other A-listers stood up, forming a loose circle around the trio. There were only five of them, but Dash and Kwan were big, and Valerie knew karate. Sam was pretty athletic, and did some martial arts. Tucker was a toothpick. An unhealthy toothpick. Danny had learned a lot of self-defense stuff from his parents, but he was, as Dash liked to remind him, a coward. The thought of hurting another human being made his skin crawl.

They were no match.

Dash pushed Danny again. The A-list snickered. The rest of the class, Nathan, Lester, Mikey, and Ricky, didn't seem inclined to intervene.

Sam dragged Danny up by the arm, and interposed herself between him and Dash. "I said _back off._" The words were snarled.

"Kwan," prompted Dash.

"What?" said Kwan.

"Well, do something. Hit Foley or something."

"H-hey!" said Tucker. "Why me?"

"Leave him alone," said Danny.

"Or what?"

"This is my house, Dash, my parents are just upstairs," said Danny, hoping that the bully would see reason.

"Yeah," said Sam, still holding onto Danny's sleeve, "and they're going to be back down here any minute." The fingers of her gloves squeaked against Danny's suit. It was so _weird_ to see her in orange.

"So, what?" said Paulina, starting to remove her jumpsuit, revealing something frilly, pink, and revealing. "They are not doing anything wrong." Her nose wrinkled. "We could probably wreck this place and those weirdos would never notice."

"Heh, yeah, that could be fun," said Dash, flexing.

"No, don't!" Danny's parents had spent years on this stuff. They'd be devastated, even if most of it didn't work.

"I've got a better idea," said Valerie. Paulina glared at her. At the moment, they were in competition for the queen bee spot. It was too early in the year for the hierarchy to have solidified. "We came to see that thing, right?" she hooked a thumb over her shoulder, towards the portal. "They were going to turn it on, right?"

"Yeah?" said Kwan.

"Sure," said Dash.

"And it was supposed to be a portal, right? Like, people were supposed to go into it. So, maybe someone should go into it."

"Hah! Yeah," said Dash, crowding forward, as if to herd Danny, Sam, and Tucker into the portal.

"Whoah! No, no, no, no," said Danny, going pale, "do you have any idea how dangerous that could be?"

"Well, Fenbuttwipe, someone's going in, or else we're going to start breaking stuff."

"Everyone will know it was you if you do that," said Sam.

"Yeah, how?"

"We'll tell them," she said, confidently.

"Yeah, and we'll say it was you."

"I'm not going to wreck my own parents' lab," said Danny, disgusted.

Dash seemed to think about that for a minute. Then he lunged forward, ripped Sam's camera from her hands, and held it over his head.

"Hey!" she shouted. "Give that back!"

"Maybe I'll just break your girlfriend's camera then, or, hey Kwan, get Foley's gameboy!"

"No, Jessica!"

"Or Kwan'll break your boyfriend's gameboy!"

"That's my grandmother's, give it back! It's an antique!"

"Jessica isn't a gameboy! She's a PDA!"

"We aren't dating!"

"Well, one of you'd better get yourself in there, or else you're not gonna be seeing either of them ever again."

Sam bit her lip. "_Fine,_" she ground out. "I'll go."

"No way," said Danny, grabbing her wrist.

"Danny, that camera's like, sixty years old. I'm not going to let him wreck it."

Danny scanned her face, wide-eyed and scared. Crap. She was really going to do this. He didn't think that the portal was really dangerous. In his experience, nothing his parents made was really dangerous, just annoying. But if they walked down, and someone was in the portal, they'd flip out. They'd expect Danny to keep stuff like that from happening.

A whine rose from the back of his throat.

"I'll do it," he said. His parents would be a little more forgiving if it was him. Hopefully. And he was more familiar with the technology, too, so maybe he'd be able to spot trouble spots, too. Maybe he'd even be able to avoid being slimed, but that was pretty much inevitable when it came to the Fentons' ecto-powered inventions.

"Are you sure?" asked Sam.

Dash shoved him. "Maybe I'll take some pictures," he said, waving Sam's camera. The other A-listers were pulling out their phones. "Get a good shot of your weirdo dad's face."

Danny scowled, and Sam snaked an arm around to rip off the large sticker from the front of Danny's jumpsuit. She crumpled it up, and threw it at Dash's face. Dash responded by shoving Danny towards the portal.

"Hurry up, Fenton!" he said. "We want our pictures!"

Ugh. He was going to get in so much trouble. Better him than Sam or Tucker, though.

He stepped into the portal, noting how his hair started to stand on end. It was dark in there.

He turned around. "Okay, I'm in. Give them back their stuff."

"All the way in, Fenton," said Paulina. "I want you to touch the back."

Danny sucked his lips in. He really didn't want to go all the way in, but he looked at his friends, and turned back. The portal didn't work, it didn't work, it didn't wor-

He tripped.

_Click._

Danny had broken his arm once, when he was nine. He had thought that had hurt.

It was _nothing _compared to this.

This was everything. This was fire, and ice, and a thousand needles made liquid and injected into his blood. His bones _burned._

He screamed. He screamed. He screamed.

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They were transfixed. They had never seen- They had never _heard- _

Dimly, they heard other screams. His friends. Manson. Foley. But _his. _Fenton's. Danny's.

They stopped. The hole in the wall swirled green. Calmly. Quietly. The electric hum had turned into a kind of purr. It looked like something that would be hungry, but had been sated. For the moment.

Dash sunk to his knees. "Oh my god," he said, his voice hoarse, just audible over Manson's sobs. "Oh my _god. _He's dead, isn't he? I- I _killed _him."

"I'm going to get Mr Lancer!" squeaked Mikey.

"No!" shouted Dash, grabbing hold of Mikey's arm before he could get very far. "You can't!"

"What?" said Mikey, wide eyed.

"We have to," said Nathan. "We can't-"

"He's dead," Star. "He's dead, he's dead, he's dead-"

"Yeah? Who d'you think is gonna get blamed for that? We are! All of us! We made him go in!"

"No," said Paulina. "No. No. No. He can't be dead. He _can't._"

"We've gotta," said Dash, "we've gotta say that he ran away or something."

"Are you serious?" said Mikey. "Are you an idiot? We can't keep this _secret._"

"We can say that a ghost took him," said Valerie, breathlessly. "That it came out of the portal, and it took him. It's supposed to be a portal, right? Something came out and took him." Her eyes never left the portal as she spoke. "That way no one gets in trouble. Go-" She turned. "Go tell1"

"Something- He's moving!" said Sam. "He's alive!" She was on her feet, running forward, slipping through Tucker's hands. Tucker followed.

They looked. There was a discolored spot behind the veil of the portal's surface, that, with a charitable eye, looked like a human figure moving closer. And closer. Closer.

Sam and Tucker stopped inches from the green mist that made up the portal.

"Danny?" called Tucker, uncertainly.

"What if it's not him?" said Lester.

Then the shape fell through, trailing green vapors. It wore white and black, like Danny had, but it was wrong, all wrong. It glowed. Its skin was tan. Burnt. Its hair was white. The jumpsuit's colors were inverted.

It fell through Sam and Tucker's outstretched hands and _flickered. _

They all took a step back. All except for Manson and Foley, who dropped to their knees next to the thing. What was _wrong _with them?

"G-get the Fentons," said Paulina.

"No!" said Sam. "They're ghost hunters! They'll kill him. Dammit, Danny, wake up." She tried to jostled him, only for her hands to sink through his shoulders. "Please, Danny."

"Come on, dude."

The thing on the floor shuddered and looked up. Its eyes were green, and shone like stars. It's hands reached out, and grabbed both Sam and Tucker. The fabric of their shirts crumpled in his grasp. It searched their faces.

Hungry.

Then, all the tension drained out of it. It went limp.

There was a flash of light.

Danny Fenton lay limply on the floor. Then he twitched, pulling in a left hand so hideously burnt that the jumpsuit had _melted _into the skin.

"He's breathing," whispered Tucker. "Sam, he's breathing."

"He's breathing? There's a pulse. Oh my gosh, there's a pulse. There's- Someone go call 911! Someone- Someone get his parents. What are you waiting for?!"

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No one talked about the... incident. No one talked about it, but everyone remembered it. It was like walking on eggshells. The A-list almost fell apart.

They were all very aware that the only reason they weren't in jail was that Manson and Foley lied. They said that Danny had just been standing _next_ to the portal, when it suddenly turned on and shocked him. No one was sure why they did that.

Then Fenton came back from the hospital. He came back whole and healthy. He came back nervous and strange. They all watched him out of the corners of their eyes. Sometimes he disappeared. Sometimes he fell though the floor. Sometimes he hovered over the ground.

They pretended not to notice. They were comparatively little things, anyway. Things they could dismiss.

But then- Then came vegetarian lunch day.

Then came the Lunch Lady.

And little, unassuming Danny Fenton _changed._

The Casper High student body was never the same again.


End file.
